"Totally coup, yo."

Looks pretty damn “real” to me, the dead, and all the people still without power and water.
But what the hell do I know? I’m just the guy who captions the photos.

In Which I Decide to Fight a Hurricane

In the days leading up to her arrival, Hurricane Sandy had been hyped by meteorologists in windbreakers, 24-hour newscasters, and your friends on Facebook as some sort of “Megastorm.” It was like that movie, The Perfect Storm, except that instead of being a movie you caught on cable/a flight, it was a real thing in real life that you could participate in. By texting or tweeting jokes. Or by asking your buddies, Google and Siri, about it. Or by getting bored and accidentally passing through CNN2 Territory. But what ended up going down, when Sandy finally hit the East Coast, was an unprecedented clusterfuck of publicly-conducted reports, experiences, and perceptions, and a bunch of wind and rain and snow and floods. Having thrown myself needlessly into the mess through a convoluted concatenation of events, I am still reeling in confusion. What really happened?

This shit is almost over with.

Obama and Romney hug it out, bitch.

Holy fuck shit am I sick of this election.

All of it, just all of it. The pointless debates, the endless pontificating by overpaid TV blowhards, the fact that Romney and Ryan can lie their fucking asses off, and no one in the media will call them on it, and if they do, they’ll write it off as no big deal, because apparently asking our politicians for accountability is like, sooooooo 1974….

Reddit, perverts, free speech, privacy, toughtcrime, misogytrolling™, and my own personal ignorance all wrapped up in an article that’s way too long for anyone to read…which is probably for the best

Let’s start with one of my favorite tunes. “Smut” by Tom Lehrer:

Okay then. Time to make myself a moral pariah. Again.

Interesting exposé by Gawker’s Adrian Chen is interesting. Since you’re on Internet, I presume you’ve read it. But, anyway, it’s about one Michael Brutsch. He lives in Texas. HasHad some shitty job. Just a normal guy who likes to anonymously propagate jack-off pics — up-skirts, ripped Facebook bikini shots, etc. — of unwitting underage girls on the Reddit. He’s also into “Niggerjailbait” and “rapebait” stuff. He’s the Internet’s most prolific peddler of taboo. Well, he used to be, before Chen outed him.

A BEAST Guide to the Politics

1) The main thing you’re going to want to watch out for are two moving shapes that make a bit of noise. Those shapes are called politicians. You can tell this by their flag pins. The odd sounds they emit is called pandering bullshit.

“There is no race more human/ No one throws it away like they do.”
–Titus Andronicus, Battle of Hampton Roads

“Awwww! Look at that cat try to run up that slide. Silly cat.”
–You, Right Now

Global warming used to be an issue that galvanized the public. In the mid-aughts, you couldn’t watch television or open up a newspaper without hearing something about greenhouse gases, or lowering our carbon footprint. Thanks, in part, to documentaries such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, global warming—an issue that had remained in the cultural and political periphery for decades—had finally hit the mainstream.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has a problem. He’s the type who unironically referred to Bush’s plan to let Wall Street pillage Social Security as “reform.” He now says that Paul Ryan’s mission to replace Medicare with coupons-of-lesser-value is a “plan to reinvigorate” the program. On MSNBC, he said the probably-won’t-be Veep’s now-infamous slew of RNC lies were merely facts “out of context.” All the tragic, familiar signs are there. Hell, even his blog is called The Fix. Like so many poor souls of his lost journalistic generation, Chris Cillizza is addicted to bullshit.

There’s a point in Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary 2016: Obama’s America when you think to yourself: This is the greatest film ever made. And if its status as the 4th highest-grossing documentary of all time is any indication, the infinite wisdom of the free market nearly agrees.

So I’ve been missing in action. Yeah. Gone. Mentally. Out to brunch. Living under a frock. Head buried in the flan. And other things. Sorry about that. But there was good reason. Well, there were reasons.

I’ve been depressed, dejected, and generally horrified. What can I say? I’m weak. And ashamed about it, too. Paralyzed by nihilism. Probably a little lazy. And the drugs don’t help. They may not hurt, but they do not help. I don’t know, exactly, but I’ve been in an existential funk, haunted by imminent futility—mine, yours, political, journalistic, comedic, artistic, humanistic. Is that a word? I don’t care. That’s a good sign. I think.

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